Conversational English in 1586

Sounds like a modern-day Swede speaking English after learning it from an Irishman

"Let us have a reckoning". Gotta remember that one next time I'm at Aldi

Always up for a pint of wine

"How do you?" = Howdy

I love this sort of thing. Just a French lad trying to help his fellow French refugees, and accidentally creates a brilliant primer on honest-to-goodness 16th c. street English, not the "proper" stuff taught at school. I'm sure Mr. Bellot would've been pleased to see us finding such utility in his humble phrasebook, all these centuries later.

I hear people speaking like this normally when i hide in the bushes to hear people talk

I love how the whole video is just some random footage of some grass.

“god be wy” looks like how someone might type “god be with you” over text lol

I'm honestly amazed at how comprehensible this is. I had expected much more Middle-English era words and grammar to be present, especially in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, but now I'm happy that, were I to acquire a time machine, I could have a pint with the lads 400 years ago 😂

My great grandfather, a former native of Galway, born 140 years ago, used "tis" a lot. He also would pronounce a lot of words with extra syllables and then skip entire words if he thought you would think them implied by context. "Tis fine moranin, tain't na rain in sight." is an example. Or "ga fetcha me slippers lad, under bed." would be another. He died in 1964. He learned Irish from birth and spoke it exclusively until he was in his teens when he found it necessary to learn English to transact business in the nearest town, Loughrea.

I love that old "how is it with you?" ... literally how it's said in the Netherlands and Norway

'What do you lack?' sounds like my late grandmother, who lived in the Appalachian mountains, when asking if we wanted seconds at the dinner table. This is a fascinating book! Thanks for the excellent video.

I'm a simple man. I see a video about conversational English in 1586 and I click

I found the phrase right at the end of this video really interesting, “what is of the clock?” “it is two of the clock” and explains why we say 2 o’clock now.

7:22 lmao he said “farewell, then” 😂😂 That made me laugh idk why. I wish haggling like this was available everywhe

We still routinely greet people with "How..." in the north-east. "How lad, ya alreet?"

Totally using ‘shall we have a reckoning’ when paying for something

Listening to that haggle conversation was incredible. I was cast back in time. Thank you.

I don't know a lot about how Londoners spoke in 1586, but I do remember when I was a young child in NE England in the 1960s, that when counting money in shops, in phrases like 'two pence', 'three pence', 'six pence', people always used to stress the number and not the word 'pence'. So they said 'tuppence', 'threppence', 'sixpence' as if they were single words. The coins were known as 'tuppney, threpney and sixpenny' bits. But when the UK currency was decimalised in 1971, people in shops started saying, instead, "That will be six new pence, please' stressing the fact that it was new pence and not old. After a few years, they stopped saying 'new pence'. But the word pence continued to hold its stress. I never heard the word 'bit' used for coins any more after that. They became known as two-pence, five-pence and ten-pence pieces. Does anyone else remember this?

What's funny about English in this time (say, 1500-1640ish) is that when subtitles are included, as you've done here, it's really easy to understand. But if the subtitles were to go away (i.e. if I were that time traveler) then I could maybe pick up about half of the conversational speech I heard. What I love about your videos is the eerieness of Middle and Early Modern English, almost like you're listening to some buried ancestral memory. I keep looking for ways to include your inspiration in my fiction. Thanks so much for this rare window into the past, Simon. ❤